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By Root 124 0

at his appliance store in Haskell. Had for years. He helped bring the hill people of that region, the Jackson Whites, into the age of electronic convenience and entertainment. He was an early emissary of illusion. At night and on weekends he would alternate between reading everything—magazines, newspapers, books—and watching TV. He fed on information. He could watch any sport with an equal amount of interest, whether it was football or curling. He knew enough about everything to have an opinion sufficient to converse intelligently in the time afforded him by commercial breaks. He would lie on his side on the sectional with his head on one of the cushions turned perpendicular to the back of the couch. He always had his arm pointing straight up into the air with his clicker in his hand like a divining rod. It looked uncomfortable to me, but maybe there was method to it. Maybe God was guiding his channel selection.

The television was mounted in a wall in the den. The back of the set jutted out into a closet. Sometimes I would go into the closet and stand behind the set and my grandpa would say, “I can see you on TV.” We played that game often. I transcended channels. It was a lie I wanted to believe.

Next door to my grandparents lived the Nurik family: Irv, Marjie, Jody, Tracy, Cary, and Jeff. At one time or another they all baby-sat my brother, Craig, and me and they had a pool, so we were over there often. Irv was a hyperintelligent man, obsessed with film. He had shelves crammed with books about movies. I couldn’t stop looking at those books. There were stills from films I had never seen set beside formal portraits of the actors in them. To me, they were portraits of magicians capable of conjuring perfect realities. I became fascinated with the black and white faces of Hollywood’s Golden Age. I could name them like some kids could name baseball players. I didn’t know what Tom Seaver looked like, but I could identify Lionel Barrymore at a distance.

Deep within the Nurik house was a cave of enlightenment that permanently changed the way I looked at the world. The first time Cary baby-sat us, I remember walking through a hallway in their house, then up some stairs into a small dark room that seemed to resonate with a compelling weirdness. Cary was a bearded teenager and the keeper of a mystical domain. The walls and ceiling of his room were entirely covered with posters: an American Indian smiling with a sandwich (“You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye”), Zappa Crappa, The Fillmore, Procol Harum, Hendrix, the Marx Brothers smoking a hookah, W. C. Fields, Muddy Waters, and foldouts from Crawdaddy magazine. There were at least two thousand records lining every wall of the room. There were stacks of Mad magazines in the corner. Above his desk in a frame was the promotional lobby card of the cast of Tod Browning’s Freaks. Irv’s books and Cary’s room singed themselves onto my cortex. They left a brand that marked a doorway to dark mysteries in my mind. Behind that door lay the isolated suffering of the human oddity, the enchanting, dark spell cast by celluloid royalty and the chaotic, drug-soaked spirituality of the sixties.

3

WE left New Jersey when I was seven and moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where my father did a two-year stint in the air force and my mother faded into a self-obsessing darkness.

Our next-door neighbor was a woman named Esther. She baby-sat us. My mother would walk us over to her house, and when the door opened the warm smell of cigarettes and stewing meat would engulf us. Her living room felt like the lair of a witch. It was always dark and eerily cluttered with Chinese, Japanese, and Eskimo artifacts and art. Everything was mysterious and delicate in Esther’s house, including Esther. She looked like she was a hundred years old but had the energy and intensity of someone half that age. She would sit in a big chair in a cove by the door surrounded by shelves filled with little boxes, statuettes, books, and pieces of fool’s gold. She had the air of royalty in exile. My brother